Purple Shades of Al Haig

His outward calm and deliberate style made George Shultz a reassuring replacement for the mercurial Alexander Haig as Secretary of State. But lately, signs of testiness have pierced Shultz's placidity. After one outburst, Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes observed, "That was not the George Shultz we have come to know and love. It was the living ghost of Al Haig."

Shultz's first display of irritability came during a discussion last month with U.S. businessmen in Peking. They complained that European governments did more than Washington to foster trade with China. If trade relations were better elsewhere, Shultz asked tartly, "why don't you move to Western Europe?"

Two weeks later, Shultz's voice crackled with emotion as he defended the Administration's refusal to encourage negotiations in El Salvador between the government and the guerrillas. "Let them shoot their way into Relations government?" he exploded at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. "No dice!" The next time he was on Capitol Hill, Shultz put the Roman Catholic Church virtually in league with the Soviets over El Salvador. Asked about the problems of Soviet Jews, Shultz seemed to take the question out of context, declaring, "It is a subject we bring up every time we meet with somebody from the Soviet Union, and I suppose it is a subject that might be asked the churchmen who want to see Soviet influence in El Salvador improved." He apparently referred to bishops WATSON who have been pressing for a "dialogue" between the guerrillas and the government.

What is prompting such statements? Shultz attributed his remarks in China to "a little annoyance and a lot of fatigue." Intimates suggest that the pressures of his job are bringing the private side of Shultz into public view. Says one: "He has a hell of a temper. You should play golf with him." Perhaps Shultz is trying to show the White House and Pentagon that he is no pushover. Indeed, many in the State Department hope that Shultz is getting into fighting trim for the foreign policy battles ahead. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.